Condo lobby takes a cue from history

Artist uses salvaged wood as his medium in entrance

When Vulcan Inc. commissioned an art installation for the lobby of its new Rollin Street Flats condominium building, artist Leo Berk proposed making the lobby itself a work of art.

"It's part of my interest in engaging the viewer," he said outside the building Friday. "You can put something on the wall and it's easily ignored or dismissed."

At Rollin Street, everyone who comes in the door will walk on Berk's lacquered fir floor tiles. People will sit on or lean against upended fir beams or sort their mail on a counter made of 6-inch-thick fir decking. All of the wood came from the building Rollin replaced.

The idea came from seeing the end-grain fir floor in the gymnasium of the nearby Naval Reserve Building, then the massive fir beams and thick decking in the old building on the Rollin site.

These days, concrete has replaced old-growth fir trees as the building material of choice, but the principle is the same, Berk said. "People think we'll always build buildings out of concrete. Well, I think 100 years ago, people thought we'd always build buildings out of timber."

Berk filled in the natural cracks and man-made holes of the old beams with blue epoxy, highlighting the imperfections.

"Part of this project is about the history of the material," he said.

"There's also times where we bumped it or screwed up, but it's all OK because we filled it with blue epoxy, and now I've got my mark on it, too."